Memory for Melodies among Subjects Differing in Age and Experience in Music

Abstract

An unfanmiliar commercial song of 12 measures was learned by four musically experienced college students and four 4th-grade children, who each had had about 5 years of piano training, and eight musically unexperienced college students. Each subject was presented the melody auditorily and required to reproduce it in singing ten times. The experienced students were far superior to the unexperienced ones, regardless of age, in the speed of acquisition as well as the eventual level of mastery of the melody. Additional experiments revealed that both musically experienced and unexperienced college students could learn a poem significantly faster than the 4th graders, and that these three groups of subjects were comparable in acquiring a non-tonal (modal) Japanese folk song. Tonal melodic memory of the experienced students seemed to be facilitated primarily by knowledge and strategies specific to tonal music.

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